Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing foregrounds the present in all activities of composing, offering a new perspective on the rhetorical situation and the writing process. A focus on the present casts light on standard writing components-audience, invention, and revision-while bringing forth often overlooked nuances of the writing experience-intrapersonal rhetoric, the preverbal, and preconception. This pedagogy of mindful writing can alleviate the suffering of writing blocks that comes from mindless, future-oriented rhetorics. Much is lost with a misplaced present moment because students forfeit rewarding writing experiences for stress, frustration, boredom, fear, and shortchanged invention. Writing becomes a very different experience if students think of it more consistently as part of a discrete now. Peary examines mindfulness as a metacognitive practice and turns to foundational Buddhist concepts of no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and detachment for methods for observing the moment in the writing classroom. This volume is a fantastic resource for future and current instructors and scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.

Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing foregrounds the present in all activities of composing, offering a new perspective on the rhetorical situation and the writing process. A focus on the present casts light on standard writing components-audience, invention, and revision-while bringing forth often overlooked nuances of the writing experience-intrapersonal rhetoric, the preverbal, and preconception. This pedagogy of mindful writing can alleviate the suffering of writing blocks that comes from mindless, future-oriented rhetorics. Much is lost with a misplaced present moment because students forfeit rewarding writing experiences for stress, frustration, boredom, fear, and shortchanged invention. Writing becomes a very different experience if students think of it more consistently as part of a discrete now. Peary examines mindfulness as a metacognitive practice and turns to foundational Buddhist concepts of no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and detachment for methods for observing the moment in the writing classroom. This volume is a fantastic resource for future and current instructors and scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.

The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiqui tous in writing programs across the na tion. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Cen tury, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather together contributing experts from both creative writing and composition studies-a discipline rich with a wide range of established peda gogies- to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing work shop. Contributors in this volume pres ent fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogi cal ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either to supple ment the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike.

"My poems are often dreams; my dreams are poems," Alexandria Peary tells us in her marvelous first book. These poems describe a world resembling out own, beneath which she finds endless off-kilter surprise and beauty. "Outside," she writes in one in one startling moment, "the driftwood struggled like arms & legs" and, later, a recorded voice "looks just like a piece of tinfoil lying in the sun / in which you could go swimming." I've long admired Alexandria Peary's intelligence, her evocative skills, and her gift for discovering in the everyday such dreamlike, frequently frightening, moments.